YouTube RT – A Must-have App for Music Lovers and Surface Users

If you love listening to YouTube videos in the background, in cases of music or podcasts, for example, then you might have noticed a short-coming in the metro version of IE10 in Windows 8 and Windows RT. If you play YouTube videos or audio from, say, Pandora, and you switch away from IE to another app, all audio stops. To listen to web audio in the background you must use IE10 on the desktop. This is very annoying for tablets, like the Surface because the desktop is hard to use with touch. Luckily, we have an elegant solution for listening to YouTube in the background without going to the desktop. Meet YouTube RT.

The biggest reason for me to recommend this YouTube app over any other is because it keeps playing the audio even if you switch away from the app. Almost all other YouTube apps fail at multitasking this way. In addition, this app embraces the metro design language and has an overall polish to it. As an added perk, you can even download YouTube video for offline viewing! There are some other neat features that I detail in the Pros/Cons section later in the post.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so there are some screenshots!

As you can see from the screenshot above, you have various download options. In addition, can add videos to your “Now Playing” playlist for a lean-back experience, change streaming quality, or exit in or out of fullscreen mode. We’ll get to that in a bit.

Here, the video keeps playing even when I switch away from the app. You can see the name of the video and the uploader when you use your hardware volume keys while in another app. Very handy.

Another cool thing this app does is it keeps playing the current video even when you browse YouTube or do a search. On the screenshot above, notice the mini playback controls while I am browsing.

Finally, here’s a screenshot of playing video in non-fullscreen mode. Here, you can view video description, related videos, rate and comment on the videos, etc. You can also click on the uploader icon and check out their latest uploads, subscribe, and other standard stuff. There are a lot more that I didn’t take a screenshot of, including the download manager.

Now, before going any further, I will let you know this is a paid app, with a free trial option. At the time of this writing, the app costs only $2.49. Note that I will take extra care when recommending a paid app for obvious reasons. I want our readers to be confident that you are paying for quality products. I always recommend trying the app before buying, and will rarely recommend apps that doesn’t offer a free trial. So go ahead and try the app before deciding if you want to buy it.

Hi there,
I am the app author and just stumbled over this review. Thanks for all the positive feedback! It really helps us “little” developers!

I just wanted to address the cache issue you mentioned in the conclusion: it exists and it will continue to exist in the forseeable future. The caching is actually a “feature” in the Windows Runtime and cant be disabled and the cache cannot be cleared. As you can imagine I am not happy about this either. You will see the same thing happening with all apps that use the video player (in javascript, not sure about C#).
I did contact Microsoft about the issue and they told me that the cache is managed by Windows and will be cleared if disk space runs low, so theoretically the user should not have to worry about it. I have not confirmed this yet.

And to give an outlook for future releases: Music features are being expanded! Music Metadata, Artist Backdrops and Artist Biographies and more are coming in future releases :)

Again I would like to thank you for the great review and hope you all enjoy the app!

Hey, there. It was my pleasure to review this app. I use it often and it would be one of the first app I would recommend to a new Windows 8 user. Thanks for the concise explanation of the caching problem.

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